Character rankings 9/14 edition: voting ended

Comments

Uh... What? Did you just compare Deadpool's damage output to Psylocke and Punisher? Human Torch I can sorta see, because HT does some pretty stupid damage sometimes, but his health is a good step lower again. Deadpool not only helps protect weaker parts of your team, making it a necessity to kill him first, but 6.8k is not insubstantial, and his offense is really, really good. On one hand, you have over 3k damage for 6AP. That's pretty much completely unmatched - the only thing that comes close is Torch's "Fireball" skill. Yes, it falls off towards the end but against your typical 3* team, you're going to be able to use that at least 3-6 times for full or damn near full damage. And then there's whales, a skill which, once a week, becomes a OHKO for the entire enemy team regardless of what level or health pool, and the rest of the time is "only" significantly higher-damage than Rage of the Panther and Call the Storm. In PURPLE, a color whose list of active skills is paltry, to put it mildly (and this is now the only one that actually does damage in the 3* range, unless you want to count Nick Fury).

You can't compare that to Punisher or Psylocke. Psylocke is just weak when it comes to damage. Sure, Psi-Katana may be one of the better black skills in the game, but still, nothing she has tops 1k damage, and her strike and attack tiles are substantial but not substantial enough. Punisher is similar - barely anything does more than 1k, molotov is decent AOE but not about to win any matches, and if you want to win, you really have to rely on someone with some BIG damage.

Deadpool is not massively tanky. But he puts up a really effective shield between you and the less-tanky guys on your team, and his damage output is just downright crazy. He's no Thor or Sentry, but disqualifying him simply because his health isn't amazing is not a good argument. This isn't HT's wimpy 6k, or Hood's pathetic 5k. This is almost 7k of eating massive damage every two turns.

I see a lot of posts saying that Deadpool has a good purple, but I think you guys are missing a valuable point that the skill costs 14 AP. Now 14AP might not seem like that much more than 12 AP (it's only 2 more AP how bad could it be!), but when you consider the board drying up after 9 AP on average, this means that to get 14AP, you need to first prioritize purple in the early game, and then wait for the board to replenish on purple to get 2 more match-3s, which on average should take 5-6 extra turns. While this is fine in PvE when the games are longer due to higher health enemies, in PvP this is just way too much time to commit to a single ability. You're likely to only cast purple say 20% of your games since by the time you get out purple, your other faster guys such as X-Force or even LazyThor will have already killed off most of the enemy team. Furthermore, the skill is utterly useless vs Hood, which is pretty popular nowadays. Sure, you can kill off hood and then build purple, but then its lost a lot of its value since 1 guy is already down.

Having that inconsistent of a purple means that I don't even consider deadpool as having a relevant purple ability while team building: whether or not he belongs on a team solely depends on how much you care about his red + extra health bar for your other guys in black. The purple is a bonus that will win you random games when the board is saturated with purple, but otherwise you probably ignore it as your team probably has at least 2-3 skills better than it (and prioritizing purple as 3rd or 4th means you're probably never casting it when its 14AP). This also means that Punisher vs Deadpool is much closer than you think, simply because Punisher has 3 active abilities that are cheap enough and have enough impact to actually be cast reliably during a match. Deadpools skills might be better in a vacuum, but Punisher is clearly going to be better in a team where his 3 active skills are the only good ones in his color, while you have Deadpool with his 1.25 skills at best.

As a result, Deadpool is more of a 3rd character that you bring to the team when you already have most of your other colors covered, and need a red. He's never going to be the main focal point of your team if your 3* roster has depth, but he's a fine red + life bar when you want a third to do that.

Uh... What? Did you just compare Deadpool's damage output to Psylocke and Punisher? Human Torch I can sorta see, because HT does some pretty stupid damage sometimes, but his health is a good step lower again. Deadpool not only helps protect weaker parts of your team, making it a necessity to kill him first, but 6.8k is not insubstantial, and his offense is really, really good. On one hand, you have over 3k damage for 6AP. That's pretty much completely unmatched - the only thing that comes close is Torch's "Fireball" skill. Yes, it falls off towards the end but against your typical 3* team, you're going to be able to use that at least 3-6 times for full or damn near full damage. And then there's whales, a skill which, once a week, becomes a OHKO for the entire enemy team regardless of what level or health pool, and the rest of the time is "only" significantly higher-damage than Rage of the Panther and Call the Storm. In PURPLE, a color whose list of active skills is paltry, to put it mildly (and this is now the only one that actually does damage in the 3* range, unless you want to count Nick Fury).

You can't compare that to Punisher or Psylocke. Psylocke is just weak when it comes to damage. Sure, Psi-Katana may be one of the better black skills in the game, but still, nothing she has tops 1k damage, and her strike and attack tiles are substantial but not substantial enough. Punisher is similar - barely anything does more than 1k, molotov is decent AOE but not about to win any matches, and if you want to win, you really have to rely on someone with some BIG damage.

Deadpool is not massively tanky. But he puts up a really effective shield between you and the less-tanky guys on your team, and his damage output is just downright crazy. He's no Thor or Sentry, but disqualifying him simply because his health isn't amazing is not a good argument. This isn't HT's wimpy 6k, or Hood's pathetic 5k. This is almost 7k of eating massive damage every two turns.

I didn't compare him to Punisher and Psylocke, really. I just said they are all in the same boat of not being able to compete with the super tanks in this game.

I just said he is a low health burst damage character. You may see 6800 health as high, but that's pretty much average. Daken, Patch, Magneto, Deadpool, Psylocke, Punisher, Beast, Daredevil, Spider man all have 6800 health. 6800 health is basically the "he's not super squishy, but he is meant to require a health pack almost every match" range.

Yes, Deadpool has some great abilities, but I would never put him in a defensive alignment. First of all, his black is completely negated if you just attack him. The AI can never farm 14 purple and his red you can direct to whoever you want to mitigate its impact.

If you want to take offensive capabilities into consideration solely, then I'd put deadpool in the same category of Grey Suit Black Widow.

Unfortunately, defense is a huge part of what makes a character viable. And deadpool just isn't scary on defense. Same with GSBW.

Meanwhile, you have people cascading themselves to death against hulk, getting thunderstrike->Call of stormed to death by Thor, Getting Sacrifice->world ruptured by Sentry, getting demoliitioned to death by Fury, getting surgically struck to death by Xforce, getting rage of the panther'd to death by BP and getting shield whacked to death by Captain America.

I'm not denying that Deadpool is probably quite a treat to play with on offense. But on defense, he just slices you a few times and, before you know it, he's probably dead. He is a 1 ability character on defense.

Offense is kind of a bad way to gauge how good a character is anyway, because most people win about 90% of their offensive fights anyway, with the rare exception being to a Thor, Xforce, Hulk, Fury or Sentry.

Well, today is the last day for votes... I wonder how long until we start seeing the rankings? I don't know why this always seems so exciting, it just is!

As to HP pools being so important, I agree, but that is yet another reason I wish Colossus had been in the rankings. He seems like he could be a bit of a game-changer in that regard. I really like his yellow, and I think it helps make non-tanky characters (like Deadpool) more feasible. HE CHANGES EVERYTHING!! ....a little, sort of, maybe not really. This is why I need outside validation of my PQ opinions.

Like some of the others, I can't really vote on a full roster because I am mostly still in the 2* stage but I do appreciate you putting this together because I try to base what I build up around the results of these polls.

I see xforce as much or more than Sentry these days. IMO He is much more likely a skip for me than Sentry.

I disagree only on the principle that I would rather pick up a well leveled Surgical Strike than World Rupture as a Team-Up. I'm less likely to skip a Fury or X-Force match just for that reason. It's also why I fight any team with Deadpool , just stockpiling them for the next Gauntlet.

Are you kidding? WHENEVER I see Hulk, even if its a maxed one, I go right at him. My top 2 right now are: Thor (166) and Hood (160), and I just him with all three of Thor's abilities at once and Hulk and his team are usually DOA. And if I use Cap (151) even easier because I stun him first before ****-slapping him with my shield. Hulk is definitely NOT top ten...

Are you kidding? WHENEVER I see Hulk, even if its a maxed one, I go right at him. My top 2 right now are: Thor (166) and Hood (160), and I just him with all three of Thor's abilities at once and Hulk and his team are usually DOA. And if I use Cap (151) even easier because I stun him first before ****-slapping him with my shield. Hulk is definitely NOT top ten...

P.S. And hood is a much better deterrent on defense than Hulk...

I agree, thats also why Hulk might be the most controversial to many people skip him.

Update -- I'm back from vacation and trying hard to catch up with real life (grinding for Fury in the Heroic PvE didn't help), having finished only about a quarter of the writeups. I'll keep plugging away but it'll realistically be at least another week if not more. I'll post a new thread once it happens.

Thanks for your patience! We have some new stuff in this version of the results so hopefully it will be worth the wait.